Restored Video Shows Apollo 11 Moonwalk

NASA released Thursday newly restored video of the Apollo 11 mission from July 20th, 1969, including video showing the moonwalk more clearly than what has been seen before. It’s part of the 40th anniversary commemoration of astronauts landing on the moon for the first time.

The initial release shows 15 key moments from the mission. The video material came from a variety of sources and was assembled by a team of Apollo-era NASA engineers.

“The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video,” said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that oversaw TV processing during Apollo 11, in a statement. “The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event.”

The new videos are definitely clearer. Unfortunately, an opportunity to make them sharper still was lost, it turns out. NASA concluded after an exhaustive three year search that the original tapes–not the degraded broadcast versions–were most likely erased and reused accidentally sometime in the early 1980s for satellite missions, as NPR reports. But we’ll take whatever we can get, of course.

With that, we’d like to turn it over to you, our readers. What are your memories of the Apollo 11 mission? Let us know in the Comments section below.